Labor Mobility Partnerships Inc

Lamp improves the quality of existing labor mobility pathways primarily by professionalizing the recruitment industry, improving transparency, and dramatically reducing risks of debt bondage for migrant workers. Responsible recruitment gives workers access to well-paid, rights- respecting jobs abroad while mitigating the risks they face in the migration process. It further provides businesses with access to a steady pool of highly reliable workers that will make it easier to increase productivity gains. Historically, however, the recruitment practices in many migration corridors are unethical and rife with fraud, forcing workers into severe debt or forced labor, driven by perverse incentives built into the design. To improve the quality of recruitment, lamp tailors each project to the realities of each corridor and sector where we work. In some cases, we support by working with existing market players on cost-effective ways to adopt responsible practices or incentivize the transition. In other cases, we help seed a new industry of responsible actors or bolster the delivery capacity and market share of existing ones. In all cases, we seek solutions that acknowledge and help further the interests of everyone at the table - buyers, employers, recruiters, and workers - so that responsible recruitment can be sustained in the long run. Additionally, we recognize that information asymmetries-both in the information provided to workers and about workers' experiences-is a key driver of the risks migrant workers face. To address this, we build tech- based transparency tools that provide visibility into migrant recruitment and employment conditions. We design these tools to be cost-effective in order to deploy them at large scale, and have used them both to monitor recruitment conditions with committed partners and to elevate migrant voices when making policy and program design choices. Moreover, as we design financial products to unlock migration at scale, we take a critical eye to issues of how financial products influence quality. Specifically, we are tackling the issue of debt bondage in tandem with increasing worker opportunity and agency through new financial product designs. Historically, migrant-focused debt has earned a reputation for exploitative practices; it has been characterized by informal agreements with bad actors, usury, poorly designed credit products, and information asymmetries. These are among the reasons why workers fall into debt bondage or, at a minimum, fail to reach the promise of a higher net income while working abroad. We develop financial products that alter the distribution and timing of costs associated with the migration process - whether through insurance systems, working capital for recruiters, or skilling loans to workers, to expand access to migration opportunities across a wider income distribution while minimizing the risks migrants face.